Volvo Cars wants part of the battery factory they are building together with Northvolt to be paid for by Sweden. In total, the companies are demanding 13 billion Swedish kronor.
This is equivalent to $1.2 billion. The money is meant to cover more than half of the cost of constructing the factory in Gothenburg.
"Starting industries like this is very expensive, and financial support is crucial at this stage," says Christian Jebsen, communications director at the joint venture Novo Energy, to Swedish Dagens Nyheter.
According to Dagens Nyheter, Volvo's new factory is already lacking 70 percent of the electricity necessary to operate the plant.
And now the car brand believes that the Swedish state - and thus taxpayers - should pay the majority of the bill.
In addition to the money from the Swedish Energy Agency, Northvolt and Volvo have applied for state loan guarantees through the so-called Debt Office in their joint company. This news comes a week after Volvo announced that it was dropping its promise to only build electric cars by 2030.
However, several car brands are demanding state aid. Volkswagen has directly threatened to close several factories in Germany if the country doesn't reinstate the state aid that disappeared in December last year.
The joint association of European car brands, ACEA, recently had to admit that consumers are not buying electric cars in the quantities the factories had envisioned. Therefore, the chairman imagines that the EU will need to relax the upcoming emission requirements.
If this doesn't happen, several car brands will be hit with multiple billion-dollar fines, warns ACEA chairman and Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo.
